Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

I’m welcoming back Garnet Dupuis to the Conscious Fertility Podcast. He is a wellness innovator, exploring light, sound and consciousness to enhance brain function and transformation. He’s the co-founder of Luc’s Studios in Thailand where he’s developed a NeuroVizr to promote neuroplasticity and mental wellbeing and beyond technology. He is passionate about wildlife conservation, managing a given sanctuary and Chiang Mai and with a background in homeopathy oriental medicine and psychology, he shares his experience globally through lectures, podcast and writing. And I’m excited to have Garnet Dupuis back on the Conscious Fertility Podcast. We had an episode, it was episode 101, so check that out on Ignite creativity, reduce stress, and sharpen mental focus. And we were talking about how light and sound can do this, but I do think a little review, a short summary is worthy and needed. And so I’m kind of interested in the light therapy and the sound and how you got into it and a little bit about yourself, but that’s in the other episode. So short and sweet, sure. But why is it that people have gravitated to this or more importantly, what brought you to do this? Why do you think this is something that is needed in our world or people are benefiting from it in our world?

Garnet Dupuis 

Okay. I characterize myself, maybe I’m diluted, but I characterize myself as a spiritual person and that can mean different things for different people. But I’ve always been drawn to consciousness to deep meaning. Why am I here? Fundamental questions that I think many of us have. It’s always been the north star for me. And as a consequence, I’ve practiced sincerely in three major spiritual traditions other than being raised a Roman Catholic, which gave me a sense of the mysterious and the sacred. And my impression is that many of the traditions that are powerful developed at a time radically different than our time now that most of these traditions developed, I’ll say a thousand or 2000 or 3000 years ago. And we can only imagine what it must’ve been like, the context, what we would call the philosophical or cultural context. And basically these practices which I’ve done my entire adult life sincerely have a context.

They have a principle, they have a kind of a belief system. And where we are now is so different that it’s hard for these traditions to have a deep impact. We use ’em on kind of a superficial level, decreased stress or better sleep or something. But we just don’t have the time and the kind of magical worldview because we’re scientific now. We’re rushed, we’re urbane. And what I think as a consequence is the technology that we have can help. I guess that’s it. That the ancient traditions can be helped by our technology. A musical instrument is technology and you can use sound bowls or gongs or whatever, sitars. So I guess the short reason I’m doing it is because I need it. I feel we all need it. What’s it that we need? We need help in developing a deep and refined consciousness in the midst of a challenging world.

Lorne Brown 

So there’s an assumption that we’re not going to debate that there’s more to this life than the material world. What we can see is measured with our five senses. And historically a long time ago we were able to have time to sit, contemplate and go into these non-ordinary states. I’m using words loosely and tap into something outside of ourselves and download it, and have inspirational ideas come through us.

And what I’m hearing you say is the time when people would sit on a mountain for many years and meditate or slow down enough to access this, our current lifestyle is just so fast and instant and to be compliant, to have the discipline to do the old way, to access what’s always available to us seems to be lost. We’re not accessing it because of our societies, it’s just how we are. These tools are not so much a shortcut because shortcut can have a bad word. I think they’re on a fast track. I think they just work with where we are today and why not evolve, right? Why not evolve? And so is my understanding that these tools are helping us access what we need, but they can’t replace a practice and still accessing whatever this is consciousness.

Garnet Dupuis 

I think that’s all fair. It’s very difficult for us to see ourselves outside of ourselves. We really are so much a product of our culture, of our time, of our society without getting too romantic about hiding in a cave for 20 years. I mean even a lot of people in the past never did that. But let’s look at it at a simple level. People, we humans up until recently spent a lot of time in the dark

And we don’t do that now because of electricity and lighting. So just the fact that we don’t spend much time in the dark when throughout our evolving human history, we spend a lot of time in the dark. And dark does not mean you’re sleeping just because it’s dark. So we are terrestrial and solar. We are earthbound and living in relation to the sun. We have this circadian cycle and the circadian cycle is the metric time piece of our organism and it directly relates to our consciousness. So right there, we are already basically out of sync with our biology and if the biology is out of sync, we have to expect that consciousness is going to be labored. Okay, we might’ve said this before, I’ll make it really quick. A brain that can change when change is required is healthy and we might’ve taught it to make it real sweet and short.

There are two kinds of changes that I’m intrigued with that technology appears to support. One is the change from when I’m awake now I’m asleep. How many of us have difficulty sleeping? And it is the bedrock of the circadian biological metabolism. So if the organism, brain, the nervous system cannot say, okay, I’m sleepy now I’m tired, now I’m going to sleep. If it has a hard time doing that, just about everything else is going to have a hard time because of the circadian misalignment. Second point, let’s say you’re awake and you’re going to go from I’m busy to, I’m relaxed, I’m on task now I’m calm. How many of us have a hard time to willfully decide? Now I’m relaxing now I’m not busy. That shift, those two shifts, you can make any animal on the planet sick if you don’t let them have a sleep cycle and you don’t allow them to rest out of stress. So when I look at those two things, it’s like, shit,

Lorne Brown 

I got to share something with you. And this will target us into some of the research and some of the programs. So one is a couple of weeks ago I was in Japan for three weeks and usually jet lag kicks my butt. And surprisingly enough, this time when I came back, this is what I ended up doing. I know so much, I’ve read so much on jet lag and circadian rhythm that it’s really important to get that early morning light and light is so important to reset that. So I thought, well, I’ll take this one step further rather than going out from my early light here in Vancouver, I’m going to do your sleep and you have four or five, you have one for seven to 9:00 AM nine

Lorne Brown 

So I did that for five consecutive days and I got zero jet lag just to let you know. So there’s that. So I like the device because of the intention behind it that it’s meant to help bring a state of calm and if you’re in that parasympathetic state of calm, autonomic nervous system, so many physicians have told me, healing happens if somebody can get into that state several times a day. So you’re sharing, I like the beta one just sometimes to get me out of that overthinking mind. If you can go from hyper thinking to just calm or from dizzy daydreaming to focus, that’s a healthy brain and also makes life a lot more productive and enjoyable is my experience.

Garnet Dupuis 

Okay, two things. I’ll say a general thing first and then let’s look a little bit more at the sleep thing because when you look at the sleep collection, as you say, there are four different time periods. What’s that? Okay, more basic. In the world of the brain, we’ve been discovering an awful lot in the past 10 to 15 years in our world with flickering light and sound. The frequency following response now what we call brain entrainment was discovered in the late 1930s and the equipment was pretty crude then It was like spinning wheels and the whole thing went off the shelf. Then it came back on the shelf again in the late sixties into the mid seventies. So that’s a big discovery that the brain will follow a frequency. So you can entrain a brain to go into a certain narrow state, whether it’s alpha or whatever you want. Something incredibly important has happened since then, which is what the NeuroVizr is about. And I use the term brain engagement, engagement being different from entertainment. What is engagement? It’s the neurological discovery that the adult brain can still be modified or grow or learn or change. And the term as usual, neuroplasticity.

We thought the adult brain couldn’t change after 2025. That’s wrong. So are there techniques that can help engage the brain to start to make those healthy changes? The answer is yes. So we have to be a little bit updated on our brain neurology to realize that the brain can change and if it can change when it needs to change, that’s healthy. So the NeuroVizr exercises, the brain’s ability to change according to demand, wake to sleep, busy to calm, task to relax, have fun, chill out, deep, meditate, explore. These are all based on one simple profound issue: that our brain needs to be adaptive in real time and also over time. So that’s, hey, it’s big news, which is why I have brain entrainment as a small subset in the sessions, but they are primarily training or exercising processes so that it’s kind of like yoga for your brain. Your brain can go into all these different positions and postures according to need. So that’s what that is. And then if you want, we’ll take apart the sleep thing a little bit more. It is helpful.

Lorne Brown 

I think I also got to explain something to our listeners. Some of them are like, what is this NeuroVizr? There’s something you wear in front of your face. It’s very comfortable, it’s not cumbersome, it’s small, has nine lights, all white lights and then you have headphones, so you’re getting sound and light. What I wanted to share with the audience, how cool this thing is, is I always show my patients that these are just white lights, nine lights, but they do flash in different frequencies, so they create different frequencies. Your eyes are closed and you’re going to see colors and you’re going to see shapes and fractals. There’s no color coming off of this machine as far as I’m aware of. So you can confirm that because of what I’m telling you. So no, it’s just white light, but you see lots of colors and you will see wonderful fractals and shapes as well. And again, that’s your brain interpreting the frequency. So that’s kind of what’s happening. You’re on the table or you’re sitting lights, there’s stuff flashing, your eyes are closed, you’re hearing stuff. So he’s doing auditory and visual and it is like he said, engaging your brain, giving your brain a little bit of a workout, and through that we can have neuroplasticity and over time neuroplasticity. Did I summarize that well?

Garnet Dupuis 

Right on.

Lorne Brown

Right on. So you have some programs I’m going to read to them that’s in your apps so far in your apps. Also, I like you updating them and they evolve. So you have a program and there’s a collection of things that you can do in each program, so there’s better sleep, there’s meditation, managing stress, regulating, mood, brain, gym, brain and entertainment as you mentioned. There’s a section there. Focus, neuro athletics, creativity, self exploration, habit rewiring process processors and lucid music. And in each of those, there’s several others, I’ll call them meditations where they have a program of light flickering and auditory. On average they’re as short as five minutes. The average ones are 11 minutes and there’s a few long meditations. How do we know they’re doing what the intention is? What motivated you or gave you the idea, I’m going to play this music, this type of flashing to set the intention, what you’re hoping to engage the brain to do for all the categories. I’m curious about that. What’s the science show?

Garnet Dupuis 

I’m a smart guy and I’m creative and inventive. However, 80, 90% of everything that is in there is from the scientific resources and research that is made public usually out of universities, so I’ll say a couple of names, they may or may not be understandable if you’re not in the field, but there is the most up-to-date brain modeling theory that is in the industry right now is called predictive brain coding. And predictive brain coding is an understanding of how the brain processes information and I use that model as the superstructure to build the sessions. So I can’t claim it. I understand it pretty well, but I did not develop it. It’s there in the literature if anybody does the research. Then there are a couple of other things. There is a new field called brain signal variability. People may have heard about heart rate variability.

Well, brain signal variability is kind of similar. That’s also in there. And then the last one, I don’t know these words, they’re comfortable for me, but this other one is called hormesis, and hormesis is a principle where small amounts of a stressor create adaptation and positive growth. So I combine those neurological principles when I structure the session so I don’t just make up goofy stuff and I hope you like it, I do hope you like it, but if you don’t, then blame the neurology, not me. Okay, so like that. Okay, sleep, because let’s get a little bit more practical. I just love all the scientific stuff. To me it’s poetic and beautiful, but okay, sleep. There are four different sections in the sleep collection. The very first one is based on what’s called circadian forwarding. This is a well-known neurological process where a person exposed to light early in the day, sunlight or in this case signal coating, NeuroVizr light, will create a ship.

It’s called circadian forwarding, but it’s kind of like a weird name because let’s say you normally get sleepy at 11:00 PM If you expose yourself to early morning light stimulation bit by bit, you’ll start to feel sleepy at 10:30 PM and then if you keep going, maybe 10:00 PM it doesn’t go forever, but it is a well-known neurological circadian stimulation that helps you get sleepy earlier if you have exposure to early morning light. So that’s why those sessions are there more than light. They also are introducing activating, stimulating brain signaling so that it’s also, it’s like your morning coffee but with light kind of a thing. So that’s what that is. Again, I didn’t make it up. It’s there, so I brain coated that. Then the other one throughout the day, 9:00 AM 5:00 PM One of the reasons why we don’t sleep well is because we build up too much sympathetic charge throughout the day.

We don’t go into relaxation periods during the day that we build up stress and the more stress or technically the more sympathetic charge you build up, the harder it is to go into the circadian down slope in the early evening because the lowest circadian energy period is around three in the afternoon. The famous siesta time. Well, most of us don’t go into rest at that time to discharge the sympathetic buildup. We just keep pushing and maybe we take some stimulants to push it through. So the sleep sessions that are between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM could be renamed something like learning how to let go or hey, stupid time to relax, something like that.

Lorne Brown 

The names you use right now are afternoon, rest, just let go. So close.

Garnet Dupuis 

Yeah, getting close

Lorne Brown

Sleep angel and sleep angel, and then you have a shorter version, just let go. Is there a big, I mean there wouldn’t be a big difference, but why not one? Why are there three different sessions for that time?

Garnet Dupuis

It’s like some people like ice cream, chocolate, vanilla or strawberry.

Lorne Brown 

Fair enough. Again, it’s more engagement, right? Sometimes you change it up. Got it. Okay.

Garnet Dupuis 

Give you a choice.

Lorne Brown 

Quick point Garnet’s, episode  101, the brain signaling variability. A lot of the research that you’re probably asking about is in episode one, so I just want to let people know about that if you want to learn more about that. So 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM is part of that circadian rhythm to get the early morning light’s importance. We hear so many other people talking about that early morning light, what it’s doing to the hormonal system as well. Nine to five is to get that excess sympathetic charge. Like you said, we’re building up and now we can have wind at night, and then you have two more time periods. You have a five to seven and you have a seven to 9:00 PM

Garnet Dupuis 

Okay, the five to seven is the down slope. If you hit that dinnertime kind of thing and you’re still spitting fire and you need some help instead of three martinis or joints or I don’t know. This helps the down slope in terms of, okay, oriental medicine, we know that yin is rising at 3:00 PM roughly. That is the beginning of the yin period. So if yin hasn’t taken place and you’re still young, charged between five and seven roughly, you know what I mean? That period right after dinner or if you have a late dinner, then this helps you turn the corner. This is a down slope and then I’ll jump right in. Then the last one, it is closer to sleep induction. I’ll say the nine to five and the five to seven is more like sleep training. It’s nervous system training, how to shut off, how to go down slope, how to shift from yang to yin, how to have not too much yang charge build up and sustain. The last one is sleep induction. It’s a kind of light and sound sleeping pill that offers a kind of knockout punch. If you need that, then that’s what that is.

Lorne Brown 

I think I heard it once when we were chatting, so I’m going to share what’s happened to me and I don’t know if it’s like, oh, that’s what’s supposed to happen or I thought I heard that, oh, I’m too much for my brain. So I kind of went lala that when I do that seven to 9:00 PM oftentimes and everybody I use the intensity is to 10, I’ll use a seven or eight intensity. I like it. I’ve worked my way up, so there’s a big flashing light. You would think you wouldn’t fall asleep with that kind of light flashing in your face, but I often fall asleep during that. When I do the last one, I will fall asleep and 20 minutes later I’ll wake up noticing that the session’s over and I fell asleep during the session.

Garnet Dupuis 

Yeah, yeah. We like sexy stuff and we also like simplifying things, so if can be simple and sexy, it ends up being a cultural meme pretty fast

And all the light things, oh, evil light all of a sudden. Okay. The stimulation period is one thing I got research out of, I forget the long name. It’s the US Occupational Hazards and Health Department. It’s the department that studies shift workers, nurses, airplane pilots, the whole thing in terms of safety and efficacy and one of the findings there, and it’s in the literature, you can read it online, is that they found not they famously it was found that a short period of light intensity in and around that time increased sleep valence and deep sleep that a short burst actually was not negative. It was actually positive. It was short, the thing was it had to be a short period of strong light, so not five hours of strong light, but in the midst, this hump into the system actually supported better sleep. So it makes sense. We have to be careful about a super popular social meme that is sexy and simple and it’s got to be true. Oftentimes it’s only partially true in this case, you have to put it into context.

Lorne Brown 

I was just thinking of somebody, a friend of mine’s coming by and she had a concussion a while ago, and I remember in your book somewhere, I don’t know if it was habituate gamma, but this is just totally, I wasn’t planning to ask this question, but it’s just entered my mind. I think you talk about one or two that are helpful for somebody who’s had concussions, she still has some brain fog and headaches. Once in a while I told her we’ll do a little sound table, some red light therapy, and I said, I think there’s something in the nerve advisor that may help. Can you share kind of what anecdotally, I don’t think you have research on this, but where you would go with your sessions and with somebody like that?

Garnet Dupuis 

Absolutely. We have to be cautious. It’s not a medical device,

It’s a wellness device. It’s kind of an exercise training device for your brain. Okay, that’s cool. In neurofeedback, which is a well-developed category of biofeedback, it’s really one of the only ones that survived from the eighties. Biofeedback was going to change education, spirituality, psychology, politics, and it didn’t. But neurofeedback has survived in neurofeedback and there are maybe 10 different schools of neurofeedback. So again, let’s not oversimplify this. There’s been a constant observation that many people, many of us have zones of stickiness. Our brain wave process tends to get stuck in certain narrow bands. The technical term is fixated or habituated. I call it sticky or stuck or glued as an image. And unconventional neurofeedback, and I’m making this as a general statement, but it’s still accurate. It has been agreed that it takes anywhere from 10 to 30 neurofeedback sessions to get the brain to move out of this sticky habituated rut in the signaling.

So it’s like, oh shit, what do we do? Then as a consequence, I’ll try to make this release succinct, but still true. There is another school of neurofeedback called intermodal intensive neurofeedback. Intermodal meaning, okay, here I’m at the desk, I’ve got my thing, you’re strapped up, let’s go to the other side of my room. There’s another desk there. Let’s do something different. And based on where the brain is stuck, you get that from neurofeedback, let’s go in and scramble those eggs and you’ll do it with certain microcurrent processes or with pulse magnetic processes. I’ve adapted it to use light and sound processes and I’m going to make a statement here please though, does anybody misunderstand me? You’ve heard of shock therapy, it’s popular in movies or convulsive therapy and something in the mouth and they shock the shit out of the brain. And what this does is it moves the brain out of habituated patterns, but it’s very nonspecific and it’s quite a challenging process.

Well, if you take all that down, down, down, down, down, down, and if you can come in very specifically and noninvasively and make it hard for the brain to stay in that groove for a short time, then you have the basis of getting it to move. So what you’ve got is a three step process, ideally disconnect from the stickiness, reconnect with a healthy alternative, and then reinforce the healthy alternative so you don’t let the brain get stuck where it’s stuck because the brain is always looking for signals and noise. The brain has a relentless voracious appetite for pattern recognition. So if you don’t let it sit in the rut of the stickiness, the habituation, that narrow band is going to be hungry for something, right? Then you give it the kale salad that it would otherwise never want to eat and it’s like, ah, I was so hungry. That shit actually even tasted good. Pardon me, I swear.

Lorne Brown

And then, okay, on our podcast, we’re right rated R, we’re rated

Garnet Dupuis 

Listen, we’re Canadians, I’m being conservative with my spirit. And then you reinforce it a little while later. So you give them the kale salad for lunch and you give them another salad at dinner, and that’s the process. So out of neurofeedback and multimodal intensive neurofeedback, they’ve noted certain subjective behaviors that tend to be associated with those neurological stickiness points. I put that, I didn’t make those up. Those are the subjective symptoms that neurofeedback has determined

Lorne Brown

Okay

Garnet Dupuis 

And they’ve determined. They’ve noted some people that have bumped their head sometimes appear to be sticky in gamma or I think also maybe in a high beta. So I put them in the book again, I didn’t make ’em up. These are subjective expressions of habituated brain wave frequencies derived from neurofeedback studies.

Lorne Brown 

Excellent. And you have the habituate gamma and beta and alpha and delta theta, and you do list from the research kind of what that stuck looks like. And that’s the great word, the notice except choose again. There’s that three step. I like using the habituating program for five minutes before because that’s helping unstuck what the notice accepting it is. And then the choose again is let’s reinforce it for something that you prefer.

Garnet Dupuis

In predictive brain coding, there’s this whole thing called active inference where the brain wants what it believes to be true, to be true, and it will ignore information otherwise. And this is part of the problem with a sticky brain is that it will prefer its habituated interpretation. It will not want to accept new information. So soften the glue before you try to shift the brain because that glue can be pretty strong. So that’s five minutes, you don’t need a lot of time. It is just that I come in and I disallow. It’s kind of okay. We talked about brain entrainment where you bring a brain into a narrow band. This is like anti entrainment or entrainment. If anything, it’s a entrainment

Lorne Brown 

Process. And I always say when we’re trying to change old programs, old beliefs get into the operating system, are pruning old synapses, right? They don’t serve you anymore. This is that pruning. You got to unstick it and then you lay down the new pathway.

Garnet Dupuis 

Yeah, let’s make that point clear because in the past, I think 101, I say because I’m boring, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t do weed, I don’t do drugs. So what’s my shot of tequila? And my shot of tequila would be the beta de because I do a lot of buzzy, buzzy, thinky, thinky, and I think, okay, five minutes blam, that’s a crude use because I disconnect. But in the process, the disconnect is followed by a reconnect that you give, get the brain hungry and feed it the healthy stuff that it doesn’t want to eat and then reinforce it at dinner. So that’s the disconnect, reconnect, reinforce. It’s really potent.

Lorne Brown 

So looking at some of the other popular ones here that I’ll look at again, people are either asking for focus, right? Because they’re wanting to get focused, they find they have that DHD type brain that you have creativity and self-exploration. Also, the other one that’s common is managing stress and regulating moods, which I think are cousins. So how is it what makes something in your program more for focus? So you have one called focus, managed stress. You have big peace, you have a peaceful heart, gamma, gamma, and then regulate mood. You have bye-bye blues, calm down, upbeat. And in general, simple terms, how does it make it different? If somebody is feeling down, I would assume you could play with bye-bye blues or use upbeat looking to lift your mood. Somebody’s looking for focus. They could choose your laser focus or center crystal clear. But again, what’s the science? How do we know that this will set that intention and put us into that state potentially

Garnet Dupuis

It’s a combination, and I won’t challenge everybody again with the technical terms, but the current neurology is exceptionally helpful in understanding basic shifts. Part of the basic thing is the autonomic nervous system. And we know we have sympathetic co parasympathetic in the brain signal variability. You have more stability or more flexibility. The yin and yang principle from traditional oriental medicine, Chinese medicine is a good reflection of that fact. And the idea is that there are brainwave behaviors that tend to be associated with those states, but if you just go and say here, the brain may not be able to assimilate that information. So there’s a way of getting the brain’s attention, there’s a way of demanding some attention and then there’s the opportunity to give it the information that you want to give it. It’s like your process. There are lots of therapies that should work that don’t work because the person is not prepared to introduce the therapy.

It’s like detox techniques or even Qigong techniques. You’ve got to make sure that the detoxification pathways are functioning before you demand a detoxification from the tissue. If you detox the tissue but all the lymphatics are screwed up, then you just made a problem. And in a similar way, if you try to introduce certain probability states to the brain, like to focus or to calm down, have you introduced a process that allows the person to engage in that process and have you given them a way to step out and integrate that process? So it is formulaic in the sense that I just don’t walk up and take, I’m using kale because it’s kind of funny to me. I just don’t take a piece of raw kale and shove it in your mouth and say, Lorne, you need this. Chew it and swallow it. One, you weren’t even hungry. Two, maybe I should have, I don’t know. You get the idea that, okay, I’ll repeat, I’m a smart guy, I’ll own that. I’m pretty good at integrative methodologies. I like principles. But beyond that, this information is, it exists part the,

Lorne Brown 

That’s the key I wanted because you like the principles, so you’re using principles that are out, that are documented in science and you’re applying that. So there are principles to say that if you can get the brain into this kind of wave, it’s more calming, more focusing, more uplifting. That’s what you’re sharing. So there’s a reason behind it. Okay, I can,

Garnet Dupuis 

And it’s exciting stuff. The problem is for most of us, maybe it’s not in the language that we would prefer or we haven’t had an exposure to it and we want to read this stuff, but the information has to be taken into a popular form to really start to see it. For most of us, and I talked to a lot of people, way more educated than me, formally educated PhDs in neurology and the whole thing. And once you get the language it’s like, oh, you mean that? Yeah, so I won’t do it here. We don’t have time or it’s not the point. But these processes are remarkably defensible if a person has the perspective to appreciate them. So I try to make it more simple in the language. A brain that can change when changes are required is a healthy brain knowing without thinking, but I’m not making this stuff up. I wish I was that smart. I’m not and I don’t have the laboratory to do it, but the information is there.

Lorne Brown 

So we talked about things to regulate our mood. So if you’re feeling anxious or you’re feeling down depressed, there’s that. There’s things to help with sleep, help with focus. Again, my definition of what will make people happy. Then there’s people that want to have fun, like fun as in they want to explore, they want to have these non state, non-ordinary states that you want to tap into stuff. And so there’s two places I could think of. You have one called self-exploration, so I’m assuming that’s what that possibly is doing. And then you have an under brain, Jim, and this is where I wanted some clarity with you on the brain, Jim, in there you talk about I got to share the app’s X theme. When you click on something, you can click a little info bar and then it’ll tell you a little bit more. And you talk about the default mode network for example. Now I’d like us to talk about it because it’s out there in the meditative conscious world. And what I think I’m hearing is when that is suppressed is, I don’t know what’s the right word, you kind of tap into more of your conscious mind, super conscious maybe. Am I understanding that correctly?

Garnet Dupuis 

Okay, I’ll make it quick. In the brain gym, there are these networks, and a few years ago I came across remarkable research. I think it was out of Australia, I forgot a university. And what they did is they mapped the harmonic frequency of the different primary brain networks. And if you don’t know what that means, we’ll just skip it. But they generated incredible information and there it was, and I just took that information and I frequency coded the sessions. So that’s where that came from. The default mode network is the new hot child right now

The default mode means when you’re not doing something specific, that network takes over. It’s the default mode. So you picture a teeter totter, like a seesaw. When the default mode network is up, the executive functions are down. When you go into task, when you go into executive functions, task modes, the default mode network is down regulated. To use the term down regulated, okay, so hey, guess what? We found out something about the default mode network. It allows you to kind of ruminate and daydream, you’re out of task. However, the most impressive quality in the default mode is it generates this mental movie of me, the sense of there’s a me, there’s a Lorne, there’s a Garnet, there’s a me that is separate from others, not me is the default mode network. One of the principle functions neurologically of a psychedelic compound acid, ayahuasca, whatever is it downregulates, the default mode network.

Lorne Brown

That was the word I was looking for, not suppressed downregulates. Okay,

Garnet Dupuis 

It downregulates. Well then one of the commonalities of a psychedelic state in general is the feeling of at oneness, you don’t feel separate from anything. The ego has disappeared. Well, that’s the default mode network being downregulated.

Lorne Brown 

And it sounds like in our society we have a very well-defined default mode network sense of self feeling separate. Seems like a lot of people want to have this experience of oneness. Seems like when they do psychedelics like psilocybin et cetera, they have that experience. So if you wanted to downregulate that, then that would be your focus and shifting to the task. Under the brain networks, they would downregulate the leaf bone downwards.

Garnet Dupuis 

There’s another hot topic these days and you can’t stay in it for a long time, but the flow state, the flow state basically is when you disappear into a task. Well that means that you’re entirely absorbed in executive function and task mode. Remember the teeter-totter when the task mode goes up, where the default mode network goes down. So I got lost in the flow where I didn’t even think about dinner or me or whatever because of what’s called orthogonality, the oppositional relationship of one or the other. By the way, the downregulation pathologically of the default mode network is characteristic of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Lorne Brown 

So if it’s too much downregulated, you’re not in this body. You

Garnet Dupuis 

Well, I mean who am I? Who are you? The horrible, long goodbye of dementia is in part, so in the brain gym I have a collection of the best known brain networks. The salience is not in there. I’m sorry, it wasn’t in the study. So my concept was, well, if you wanted to tune, I’m using it to tune up to frequency, tune any one of those networks. I said, okay, I’ll take a chance here. I take the harmonic frequencies. They’re very weird harmonics by the way that were mapped out what frequencies and in what ratios I got from the studies and I simply coded the sessions based on the network harmonics from the study. So my thought was, well, maybe if you wanted to tune up the default mode network then here, or you wanted to have the dorsal attention or the ventral attention network if you wanted to focus or you wanted to open up what the networks do. So I took a risk in saying, well, here are the harmonic frequencies. They’re well described, what hurts and what ratios? And I took them and I coded them into light and sound with the hey, who knows?

Lorne Brown

Clarification question. Because you talked about the dorsal and ventral and you talked about the default mode network and the different systems. If somebody’s looking for more calm and exploration, I should say, then I am understanding, then you would be downregulating the default mode network if you’re looking to have exploration, right?

Garnet Dupuis 

Yeah, yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Generally generalization.

But I also heard that if somebody is struggling with dementia, that may not be a good fit for them, right? Because you say there’s a correlation between that because everything’s about balance. People go, oh, this must be good. In the conscious world, people are like default, no network, right? You want to be one thing, but you’re saying there’s a time and place and I’m doing a pendulum swing. Everybody like yin and yang, things fluctuate and there’s a rhythm and there’s a time for one should be active and there’s a time when you don’t want it active as

Garnet Dupuis

Active. Yeah, that’s right. Well, in psychedelic assisted therapy, for example, we’re not talking about a street high here. And also in the psychedelic community, more and more and more attention is being given to the integration period. If you’re tripping balls colloquially and the default mode one root is suppressed. And also by the way, alpha is hugely suppressed because alpha, alpha brain waves are the control freak of the brain. They’re suppressed, they’re locked in the closet. Then after that liberated hyperflexible typic experience comes the hero’s journey. Did I harvest anything of consequence from this liberated state that I can now integrate into the stability of my learned behavior? And in a case like that, reinforcing the default mode network, bringing back the ego state, which is not a bad thing by the way, otherwise we’re completely nuts. So that, but has this ego state been informed? Has it gathered or harvested anything of consequence from the flexible state into the stable state? Meaning did you learn anything or not

Lorne Brown 

Related to that, self exploration. Then there are some commonalities between that and the brain gym because they would be more taking down regulating default mode networks.

Garnet Dupuis :

Do you think the self-exploration is more intent on brain signal variability, moving it up into higher signal variability, higher flexibility, more dynamic or settling it down at some point? Did we do the 20 story building analogy

Lorne Brown 

In the last, yeah, that’s in episode 1 0 1, but you can repeat that. There is an analogy.

Garnet Dupuis 

Okay, super. Okay, super quick, let’s do it. Let’s do it. The 20 story building. The 20 story building is an analogy of your brain. That’s your brain. And fortunately this 20 story building also has an elevator. So you can go up and down. The lower floors are, again, it’s an analogy, they’re dedicated to stability, repeatability, predictability, known information, and it’s really important. The upper floors are not about stability and predictability. They’re about flexibility, novelty, exploration, surprise, uniqueness, the unknown, and that is our brain. Our brain is healthy and structured to have stability and flexibility, predictability, novelty and surprise. And according to circumstance, that’s the elevator. We go up and down to utilize the function of the different floors. The self-exploration moves higher up more reliably where certain calming processes will move down. So in the middle you kind of have this determined focus that also has a degree of open-mindedness. So every floor is a good floor in the building. One of those floors is your apartment because all the rest is like business. The floor as an analogy, your apartment is on around the 15th floor. So our set point, there’s this whole thing called criticality and

Lorne Brown 

Gorgeous, we’re in a 20 story building. I can’t remember if you said 10 or 20. So we’re on the 15th floor and a 20 story building.

Garnet Dupuis 

Correct.

Lorne Brown 

Okay.

Garnet Dupuis 

We’re in a 20 story building and our apartment is on the 15th floor. Why would you think it would be like the 10th floor, like halfway. The demands for quick, flexible, unique responses tend to come quickly, so we have to be closer to the high floors to go into reliability, relaxation. Usually that is a slower process, so the elevator can take a little bit longer to get there. Okay. The problem is that most of us start to get stuck in the low floors. And I’ll hold up something, I don’t know if I showed you that the last time. This is an MIT study.

It looks like a rainbow.

Lorne Brown 

So just for the visual, we put this out on YouTube if you want to see and also audit. So it was a graph from MIT and again it was an arch, like a rainbow with different colors

Garnet Dupuis 

Like a rainbow, except the pot of gold is not at the end, it’s a pot of shit because you don’t want to go there. The idea is that unless we use the elevator to go up and down the brain, our habituation tends to take over and the elevator is more and more stuck on the low floors. So that’s the self-exploration stuff. It’s the, Hey, you got a great rooftop penthouse view, check it out.

Lorne Brown 

So before the update that I have now in the app, we had a microdosing section, and so what I see on the new app is under each category, creativity, self exploration focus, a thing called routines. It seems like that’s where the microdosing sections

Garnet Dupuis 

Correct? Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Also we have to define because people hear microdosing and they think we’re giving them microdosing of psychedelics, and I would like you to set it up of what the purpose is of microdosing and it doesn’t always have to be chemical and what you were doing with the NeuroVizr, please.

Garnet Dupuis

Okay, quickly. Yeah, it’s a glorious hour long talk actually, but that, oh boy.

Lorne Brown 

But I’ll share with those that have the old app or looking, it’s under routines in any category. If you click on the routines inside that, that is basically what was called microdosing before and I guess that’s where it was. And you’ve confirmed

Garnet Dupuis

We talk about, yeah, the idea was that by moving them into categories of use, it might be easier for people to make choices. So all the sessions are still there. It’s that they are put into categories of focus or creativity instead of just having them all clumped together in microdosing. The sessions are all there. We changed the names a little bit to try to make them more relatable, but they’re all there.

Lorne Brown

I think I might’ve said again, I’ll repeat the episode we did, but when I did the microdosing of focus, I think it was 21 days, but I started around day 13 or 14 experiencing just euphoria, light bliss, just out of nowhere. I was just like, and I was like, what’s going on here? And I don’t do drugs either. Am I high? I’m just feeling really?

Garnet Dupuis

Yes, you are high. And that’s just because the elevator went to the upper floors in the building

And they’re all our brains. Okay? People think of microdosing using psychedelic compounds in low doses. I’ll make a statement. All psychedelic compounds are psychoactive agents, but not all psychoactive agents are psychedelic compounds. An agent is an item or a process or a technique that can get the brain elevator moving up and down, but not too quickly and not too much all at one time. So the psychedelic compound at a microdose level is a U stressor like euphoria, EU stressor. It’s a positive stressor. It’s a low dose hormesis. It’s a little bit of exercise for your brain. It’s a little bit itty bitty, itty bitty, itty bitty. And if you do itty bitty stressors on a certain vector over time, then the brain will tend to have a neuroplastic response.

You can walk every day a little bit and get results. So we’ve now, partly because of confusion, we call those sessions neuro dosing instead of micro dosing because you can get the same neuro incremental, low dose neuroplastic response using light and sound as a stressor, but it’s a very low dose, very conservative stressor. But that’s okay. That’s the brain totally responds as long as there’s repetition and reinforcement over time. So it is a way, neuro dosing is a way of getting the brain to change little bits at a time without using a psychedelic compound. As the psychoactive agent, you use a different agent. That’s all, and it works

Lorne Brown 

All. So I want to let our listeners know. One is we still have an active coupon because when we did this back in episode 101, your team gave us a coupon. If you go to the Accu Balance website and under what we treat, there’s a thing called nervous system reset is what we labeled it. We have lots of toys there and the top one there is NeuroVizr. So if you go into the nervous system reset under what we treat, it will have a couple of blogs that I’ve written about. Actually Garnet, when he talks about unsticking the brain, it has episode 1 0 1 there, so it’s easy to find. It also has a coupon, so you can save on a NeuroVizr if you guys are interested.

We also have it in the clinic, so if you want to use it in the clinic, you can either use it by itself, you can combine it with the sound table, so you’re getting vibration with the sound and light. So you can do it as a standalone session or you can also use it to add on to the acupuncture session. And when I do my energy psychology sessions, I bring in whatever I can in that hour. So it’s not always, but it’s quite common. I bring in the nerve visor. We don’t have to use it if you don’t want to use it, but as people know, I bring in every tool I can to help with a state change and a trait change. And so NeuroVizr is one of those things, and I was thinking of this metaphor we’re saying it wasn’t a shortcut.

This technology, it’s a fast track. Even psychedelics, most of the people I’ve interviewed say psychedelics, great, try it once or three times in your life. Most of them, unless they’re selling psychedelics, don’t say you should be doing it on a regular basis. It’s there to just help you access something and then continue to do your work. Advisor is one of those where I see it as a fast track where we compare it to the old fashioned traditional approaches, which you can still do. It’s kind of like in the nineties when we had to dial up the internet, remember to try to get in and then when you want to download something, the picture, and then all of a sudden the internet got a little bit quicker, still dial, and then all of a sudden it was wired. There was none of that. It was instant. And then wifi, you don’t have to be home now, you can go anywhere.

To me, that’s what this is. Some of those practices are like dialing up the internet. And in our society, if somebody had to dial up the internet, I think they’d throw their phone or computer out the window, they would lose it out the window. They just don’t have the time for it. And so your visor is like how we think of wifi in a good way, instant access, and you don’t have to wait 20 minutes for that picture to download. You can actually get a video too right away. That’s how I see it. I just feel it as the catalyst.

Garnet Dupuis 

Okay, that’s cool. I like it because it aligns. We all need help. That’s what techniques are. To me. There is a very small differentiation between technique and technology and hey, if it helps. How wonderful.

Lorne Brown 

Sounds great. Garnet, thank you very much. I wish you a beautiful end of your day or start of your day where you are. It’s the end of my day.

Garnet Dupuis 

I’m in Thailand here, so it’s the beginning

Lorne Brown 

And always a pleasure. Thank you. Alright, if you are interested in your own NeuroVizr, we have a coupon code for you that the NeuroVizr team provided us when we did episode 101. It’s still available. If you go to the Acubalance website and click on what we treat. There’s a section called Nervous System Reset where we talk about our sound table and the NeuroVizr system. We have a few blogs in there plus the episode 101 and it says coupon code to save 10%. So the code is Lorne Brown, I’ll make sure you spell it correctly for the coupon to work. It saves you 10%. And for full transparency, that link is an affiliate link. So they track and if you use that link from our site, they will send back some commissions to Acubalance. So I just want you to be aware of that. However, if you don’t want that to happen, just grab the coupon code, Lorne Brown and you can buy it and save. And there’s no affiliate tracking. Send back to us. And do check out the blogs that we’ve written about how to unstick a SEC Brain and his earlier podcast. I think there’s some good information there. And is also on our sound table and other wellness devices.

Speaker 3 

If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne_Brown_official. That’s Instagram, Lorne_Browno_Official, or you can visit my website, Lornebrown.com and acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.